the lot of Catholics in town unbearable, whereas in the country the pursuit was far less active, and could be much more easily avoided.  The two Fathers met for the last time at Hoxton, then a village outside London, to concert their plans for the next couple of months, and were on the point of starting, each for his own destination, when a Catholic of some note rode up from London.  This was Thomas Pounde, of Belmont or Beaumont, near Bedhampton, a landed gentleman of means, an enthusiastic Catholic, and for the last five years or so a prisoner for religion.  Mr. Pounde’s message in effect was this.  “You are going into the proximate danger of capture, and if captured you must expect not justice, but every refinement of misrepresentation.  You will be asked crooked questions, and your answers to them will be published in some debased form.  Be sure that whatever then comes through to the outer world will come out poisoned and perverted.  Let me therefore urge you to write now, and to leave in safe custody, what you would wish to have published then, in case infamous rumours should be put about during your incarceration, rumours which you will then not be able to answer or to repudiate.”  Father Persons seems to have agreed at once.  Campion at first raised objections, but soon, with his ever obliging temper, sat down at the end of the table and wrote off in half an hour an open letter To the Lords of Her Majesty’s Privy Council, afterwards so well known as Campion’s Challenge.

3.  The challenge.

Campion, after finishing his letter and taking copy for himself, had consigned the other copy to Pounde.  Persons had done the same; but whereas the latter took the precaution to seal his letter, Campion had handed over his unfastened.  Then the company broke up.  Persons made a wide circle from Northampton round to Gloucester, while Campion made a smaller circle from Oxfordshire up to Northampton.  When they got back to town in September, they found all the world discussing “the Challenge.”  What had happened was that proceedings had been taken by the Ecclesiastical Commission against Pounde, and he had been committed to solitary confinement in the ruinous castle of Bishop’s Stortford.  Before he left London he began to communicate the letter to others, lest it should be altogether lost, and as soon as it was thus published it attracted everyone’s attention, and his adversaries had ironically christened it the challenge.  The word was indeed one which Campion had used, but he had employed it precisely in order to avoid any charge that might have arisen, of being combative and presumptuous.